The journalist, writer and traveller Charles Fisher, who has died aged 91, had the melancholic distinction of being the last surviving member of the Kardomah gang, a group of writers, artists and musicians who met as young men at the Kardomah cafe in 1930s Swansea. This loose collection of friends included the poet Vernon Watkins, the composer Daniel Jones and the painter Alfred Janes. But it was the presence of Dylan Thomas, who wrote about the Kardomah as the place to talk about "Einstein and Epstein, Stravinsky and Greta Garbo, death and religion, Picasso and girls", that has afforded the group a semi-mythic status.

Fisher always denied there was anything approaching a shared cultural manifesto, and looked askance at the half-century of journalistic licence that sometimes gave the impression of a Swansea version of the Algonquin round table. But he acknowledged that these young men took art unusually seriously and set themselves high standards. "The Kardomah was important to us both as a place to report to and a place to find out what was going on. It was our touchstone. Good talk and good coffee. Well, very ordinary coffee."

It was at the Kardomah that Fisher heard Thomas read out early drafts of such poems as The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower and The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. "We did realise that there was an outstanding lyric poet amongst us," Fisher recalled. "But relations between us were always inter pares. Perhaps I should have tried harder to remember his bon mots, but it really never occurred to me. I kept a diary and one entry from a few years later reads: 'Stayed with Dylan and Caitlin in Laugharne. Boring.'"

In 1941, the Luftwaffe destroyed the Kardomah, and Thomas's and Fisher's Swansea - with Fisher, as a soldier on the north Somerset coast, watching the sky glow red. Neither man ever really returned. Fisher recalled their prewar Swansea as "a rather indulgent town with a latitude for eccentricity as well as being in other ways rigidly conformist".

A horseman, he once arrived home too late to return his mount to the stables, and so rode it to work the next day. "And I kept my riding kit on because I knew someone would say, 'Where's your horse, Charlie?' And I could point outside and say 'There he is'. But we'd nearly always wear a jacket and tie, and Dylan wouldn't dream of going against these standards. It was the same with his drinking. That was conformist in Swansea."

The two men first met as classmates at Swansea grammar school, where both were taught English by Thomas's father, DJ Thomas, whose manner, Fisher recalled, "combined considerable hauteur with an acid turn of speech". An early Fisher claim to fame was that he had been Thomas's first wife, having played the part in an all-boy school production of Galsworthy's Strife. They later became colleagues as young reporters on the local paper.

Fisher published poems in literary magazines and Thomas's early biographer, Constantine FitzGibbon, claimed that as a young writer he had shown more promise than Thomas. A collection of his verse, The Locust Years, was published in 1988. Fisher also wrote talks for BBC radio and had two plays broadcast. When Thomas was looking for a collaborator for his spoof thriller, Death of the King's Canary, he asked Fisher: "I wrote the first chapter, which I thought was very good, but I never heard from him about it again." After the second world war, during which Fisher saw action in France, he became a Reuter correspondent at the House of Commons.

While the Dylan Thomas legend was being constructed in Soho and Fitzrovia, Fisher was paying court to the young Eartha Kitt - he would take her a gardenia every night while she performed in the show Caribbean Rhapsody - and there was a brief marriage to the Spanish opera singer Isabel Elana Alonzo. In 1953, the year of Thomas's death, Fisher emigrated to Canada. He worked on the Canadian parliament Hansard, which allowed him at least six months a year of free time. It was as if his creativity had been transferred into his travelling, and he spent extended periods of time -he described them as "epochs" - in Mexico, India, Morocco and the Far East.

But it was the time Fisher spent in southern Spain in the early 1960s, where he learned the Gypsy vernacular, lived among them in caves and played flamenco guitar to unsuspecting British tourists, that most profoundly affected him. "I committed myself to the Gypsy life for a long time and I don't regret that," he said. "I don't care all that much for the life of the intellect; I like immediacy and passion." He recently wrote an unpublished memoir, Adios Granada, of those early Spanish years and the screensaver on the computer in his Canadian home flicked between images of Gypsy girls and a view from Dinefwr castle, in Llandeilo, over a prime fishing site on the river Towy. He was married again, to Jane Edwards in 1963, and although they were later divorced they stayed close.

To the end, Fisher's life in Canada and abroad was extraordinarily active. He remained an inveterate traveller, and it comes as little surprise that he was in Bangkok when he died. He was cremated at a local temple. Just a couple of years ago, a friend visiting from the UK found him not at home. He might have been out driving too fast in his open-top Jaguar - bright red when he bought it the year he arrived in Canada, now coral pink with age -but, in fact, he was out kayaking. When he returned, Fisher proposed a toast, and he drank, as suited a man who did not shy away from the dramatic gesture, from a glass that had belonged to Federico Garcia Lorca.

For many years Fisher steered clear of the Dylan Thomas industry but in 2003, the 50th anniversary of the poet's death, he returned to Swansea, where he spoke and read some of his own verse. During the speech, he was handed a poem he had written in 1939. Although he had not looked at it for more than 50 years, after briefly scanning the opening line, he read it in full, by heart, to a hushed and deeply moved audience.

He is survived by the daughter of his second marriage, Caitlin, who is a professor at York University, Toronto, and by two granddaughters.

· Charles Fisher, journalist, poet and writer, born November 21 1914; died January 24 2006